An overstuffed melodrama that’s all bark and not much bite.
It’s sink or swim when two troubled, love-struck Cincinnati FBI agents dive headfirst into the choppy waters of a drug and child-pornography ring.
Special Agent Griffin “Decker” Davenport is in a coma after he was shot during an undercover sting of human traffickers, and Special Agent Kate Coppola, new to Cincinnati, has been sitting by his side. Sparks between the two fly as soon as he wakes up, and, along with a large team of investigators, they’re on the cusp of blowing a human (specifically children) trafficking ring wide open. Meanwhile, 18-year-old Mallory Martin dreams of escape from the monster that has kept her prisoner and who, when she was only 12, dubbed her Sunshine Suzie, forcing her to “perform” in porn films. There’s only one problem: her 9-year-old sister, Macy. The drug dealer and pornographer who calls himself the Professor warns Mallory that if she tries to escape, he’ll make sure Macy will be forced to do the same things as Mallory, and Mallory would rather die than see that happen. Agents Coppola and Davenport, along with a giant cast of characters, sift through the many (many) clues while the Professor, with the authorities closing in, starts tying up loose ends, including Agent Davenport. Rose (Alone in the Dark, 2016, etc.) explores the dark subject matter with sensitivity, but Kate and Decker’s love-at-first-sight attraction, though steamy, often descends into the silly: Decker frequently gets aroused by Kate just walking into the room. However, kudos should be given for a valiant attempt to round out so many characters. Long stretches of dialogue punctuated by mild action do not make a thrilling read, and new readers will be lost, but fans of the Cincinnati series will probably be happy to see the return of favorite characters. Even a truly vile bad guy can’t give this thriller a jolt.
An overstuffed melodrama that’s all bark and not much bite.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58306-3
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the...
Just when you thought you’d seen a detective in every guise imaginable, here comes one in sheep’s clothing.
For years, George Glenn hasn’t been close to anyone but his sheep. Everyday he lets them out, pastures them, reads to them and brings them safely back home to his barn in the guilelessly named Irish village of Glennkill. Now George lies dead, pinned to the ground by a spade. Although his flock haven’t had much experience with this sort of thing, they’re determined to bring his killer to justice. There are of course several obstacles, and debut novelist Swann deals with them in appealingly matter-of-fact terms. Sheep can’t talk to people; they can only listen in on conversations between George’s widow Kate and Bible-basher Beth Jameson. Not even the smartest of them, Othello, Miss Maple (!) and Mopple the Whale, can understand much of what the neighborhood priest is talking about, except that his name is evidently God. They’re afraid to confront suspects like butcher Abraham Rackham and Gabriel O’Rourke, the Gaelic-speaking charmer who’s raising a flock for slaughter. And even after a series of providential discoveries and brainwaves reveals the answer to the riddle, they don’t know how to tell the Glennkill citizenry.
All these problems are handsomely solved at the unsurprising cost of making the human characters less interesting than the sheep. But the sustained tone of straight-faced wonderment is magical.Pub Date: June 5, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-52111-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Flying Dolphin/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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